More intuitive illustration with no logarithms: your plane crashed in the ocean. To survive, you must swim to shore. You know that the shore is west, but you don’t know how far.
The optimist thinks the shore is just over the horizon; we only need to swim a few miles and we’ll almost certainly make it. The pessimist thinks the shore is a thousand miles away and we will surely die. But the optimist and pessimist can both agree on how far we’ve swum up to this point, and that the most dignified course of action is “Swim west as far as you can.”
More intuitive illustration with no logarithms: your plane crashed in the ocean. To survive, you must swim to shore. You know that the shore is west, but you don’t know how far.
The optimist thinks the shore is just over the horizon; we only need to swim a few miles and we’ll almost certainly make it. The pessimist thinks the shore is a thousand miles away and we will surely die. But the optimist and pessimist can both agree on how far we’ve swum up to this point, and that the most dignified course of action is “Swim west as far as you can.”